After a 4 AM alarm, a 1-hour flight, a 1-hour drive, five minutes of paperwork, and a very short elevator ride, this was the sight that greeted us in the bowels of Audi’s Ingolstadt headquarters. We giggled like schoolboys. Little did we know what would await us.

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Being proud practicioners of the mandatory-Nazi-references-when-dealing-with-excellent-German-cars school of motoring journalism, our first detour was to Berchtesgaden in the Bavarian Alps, site of the Berghof, Adolf Hitler’s mountain residence.

We left the guesthouse at Berchtesgaden and pulled into a Bavarian farmer’s private driveway. Bavarian grass is marvelous, a lush, thick carpet of green. Little wonder that the tastiest milk available for sale in Budapest comes from these very mountains. A fleet of R8’s could be put to excellent use delivering it fresh from the fields—of only those pesky Austrians would adopt Autobahn-style speed limits on their fabulous mountain highways.

The Bavarian fields also provide excellent contrast to the R8’s most controversial angle—which is nothing but a function of mid-engined construction. Although that kink between the trunk and the windshield will probably always look weird. Weird in a good way.

This is the Mondsee, a private lake in Austrian hill country, a stone’s throw from Salzburg. We drove around it for an hour in the 100-degree heat until we found this spot. Worth it, wasn’t it? Note to owners of cars with lovely exhaust notes: the way around includes a tunnel.

The powers of photography are inadequate to describe the furious, volcanic heat in this photo: combine a running V10 engine with 100-degree weather and the hair will melt off your scalp. We couldn’t stand over the engine bay for more than a few seconds.

Thank the lord for glass engine covers! Missing from the picture: yours truly jogging by the car in English dress boots, making sure a lone bump or an inadequate suction cup would not send thousands of dollars of photographic equipment careening into thousands of dollars of Sepang Blue paintjob.

Okay, ridiculous sunset shot! The original plan was to drive into the courtyard of the Melk Abbey, a Benedictine abbey in the village of Melk, which is located on the south shore of the Danube. The abbey was closed for the day, so we drove out of Melk and stopped in a minuscule agricultural hamlet, where a tractor almost ran us off the road.